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THE

QUARTERLY JOURNAL
OF ECONOMICS
Vol. CXX

November 2005

Issue 4

TIM GROSECLOSE

AND

JEFFREY MILYO

We measure media bias by estimating ideological scores for several major
media outlets. To compute this, we count the times that a particular media outlet
cites various think tanks and policy groups, and then compare this with the times
that members of Congress cite the same groups. Our results show a strong liberal
bias: all of the news outlets we examine, except Fox News’ Special Report and the
Washington Times, received scores to the left of the average member of Congress.
Consistent with claims made by conservative critics, CBS Evening News and the
New York Times received scores far to the left of center. The most centrist media
outlets were PBS NewsHour, CNN’s Newsnight, and ABC’s Good Morning America; among print outlets, USA Today was closest to the center. All of our findings
refer strictly to news content; that is, we exclude editorials, letters, and the like.
“The editors in Los Angeles killed the story. They told Witcover that it didn’t
‘come off ’ and that it was an ‘opinion’ story. . . . The solution was simple, they
told him. All he had to do was get other people to make the same points and
draw the same conclusions and then write the article in their words” (emphasis in original). Timothy Crouse, Boys on the Bus [1973, p. 116].

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1. Our sample includes policy groups that are not usually called think tanks,
such as the NAACP, NRA, and Sierra Club. To avoid using the more unwieldy
phrase “think tanks and other policy groups” we often use a shorthand version,
“think tanks.” When we use the latter phrase, we mean to include the other
groups, such as the NAACP, etc.

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when it calls Steve Forbes’ tax plan ‘wacky’?”) and untested
theories (“if the news industry is a competitive market, then how
can media outlets be systematically biased?”).
Few studies provide an objective measure of the slant of
news, and none has provided a way to link such a measure to
ideological measures of other political actors. That is, none of the
existing measures can say, for example, whether the New York
Times is more liberal than Senator Edward Kennedy or whether
Fox News is more conservative than Senator Bill Frist. We provide such a measure. Namely, we compute an adjusted Americans
for Democratic Action (ADA) score for various news outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today,
the Drudge Report, Fox News’ Special Report, and all three networks’ nightly news shows.
Our results show a strong liberal bias. All of the news outlets
except Fox News’ Special Report and the Washington Times received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. And
a few outlets, including the New York Times and CBS Evening
News, were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than the
center. These findings refer strictly to the news stories of the
outlets. That is, we omitted editorials, book reviews, and letters to
the editor from our sample.
To compute our measure, we count the times that a media
outlet cites various think tanks and other policy groups.1 We
compare this with the times that members of Congress cite the
same think tanks in their speeches on the floor of the House and
Senate. By comparing the citation patterns, we can construct an
ADA score for each media outlet.
As a simplified example, imagine that there were only two
think tanks, and suppose that the New York Times cited the first
think tank twice as often as the second. Our method asks: what is
the estimated ADA score of a member of Congress who exhibits
the same frequency (2:1) in his or her speeches? This is the score
that our method would assign the New York Times.
A feature of our method is that it does not require us to make a
subjective assessment of how liberal or conservative a think tank is.
That is, for instance, we do not need to read policy reports of the

A MEASURE OF MEDIA BIAS

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think tank or analyze its position on various issues to determine its
ideology. Instead, we simply observe the ADA scores of the members
of Congress who cite it. This feature is important, since an active
controversy exists whether, e.g., the Brookings Institution or the
RAND Corporation is moderate, left-wing, or right-wing.
I. SOME PREVIOUS STUDIES

OF

MEDIA BIAS

2. Eighty-nine percent of the Washington correspondents voted for Bill Clinton, and two percent voted for Ross Perot.
3. “Finding Biases on the Bus,” John Tierney, New York Times, August 1,
2004. The article noted that journalists outside Washington were not as liberal.
Twenty-five percent of these journalists favored Bush over Kerry.
4. “Ruling Class War,” New York Times, September 11, 2004.
5. Cambridge and Berkeley’s preferences for Republican presidential candidates have remained fairly constant since 1992. In the House district that contains Cambridge, Bob Dole received 17 percent of the two-party vote in 1996, and
George W. Bush received 19 percent in 2000. In the House district that contains
Berkeley, Bob Dole received 14 percent of the two-party vote, and George W. Bush
received 13 percent.

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Survey research has shown that an almost overwhelming
fraction of journalists are liberal. For instance, Povich [1996]
reports that only 7 percent of all Washington correspondents
voted for George H. W. Bush in 1992, compared with 37 percent
of the American public.2 Lichter, Rothman, and Lichter [1986]
and Weaver and Wilhoit [1996] report similar findings for earlier
elections. More recently, the New York Times reported that only
8 percent of Washington correspondents thought George W. Bush
would be a better president than John Kerry.3 This compares
with 51 percent of all American voters. David Brooks notes that
for every journalist who contributed to George W. Bush’s campaign, another 93 contributed to Kerry’s campaign.4
These statistics suggest that Washington correspondents, as
a group, are more liberal than almost any congressional district
in the country. For instance, in the Ninth California district,
which includes Berkeley, 12 percent voted for Bush in 1992,
nearly double the rate of the correspondents. In the Eighth Massachusetts district, which includes Cambridge, 19 percent voted
for Bush, approximately triple the rate of the correspondents.5
Of course, however, just because a journalist has liberal or
conservative views, this does not mean that his or her reporting
will be slanted. For instance, as Jamieson [2000, p. 188] notes:
“One might hypothesize instead that reporters respond to the
cues of those who pay their salaries and mask their own ideologi-

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QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

cal dispositions. Another explanation would hold that norms of
journalism, including ‘objectivity’ and ‘balance’ blunt whatever
biases exist.” Or, as Crouse [1973] explains:

However, a strong form of the view that reporters offset or
blunt their own ideological biases leads to a counterfactual implication. Suppose that it is true that all reporters report objectively, and their ideological views do not color their reporting. If
so, then all news would have the same slant. Moreover, if one
believes Crouse’s claim that reporters overcompensate in relation
to their own ideology, then a news outlet filled with conservatives,
such as Fox News, should have a more liberal slant than a news
outlet filled with liberals, such as the New York Times.
Spatial models of firm location, such as those by Hotelling
[1929] or Mullainathan and Shleifer [2003] give theoretical reasons why the media should slant the news exactly as consumers
desire.6 The idea is that if the media did not, then an entrepreneur could form a new outlet that does, and he or she could earn
6. Some scholars claim that news outlets cater not to the desires of consumers, but to the desires of advertisers. Consequently, since advertisers have preferences that are more pro-business or pro-free-market than the average consumer, these scholars predict that news outlets will slant their coverage to the
right of consumers’ preferences (e.g., see Parenti [1986] or Herman and Chomsky
[1988]). While our work finds empirical problems with such predictions, Sutter
[2002] notes several theoretical problems. Most important, although an advertiser
has great incentive to pressure a news outlet to give favorable treatment to his
own product or his own business, he has little incentive to pressure for favorable
treatment of business in general. Although the total benefits of the latter type of
pressure may be large, they are dispersed across a large number of businesses,
and the advertiser himself would receive only a tiny fraction of the benefits.

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It is an unwritten law of current political journalism that conservative
Republican Presidential candidates usually receive gentler treatment from
the press than do liberal Democrats. Since most reporters are moderate or
liberal Democrats themselves, they try to offset their natural biases by going
out of their way to be fair to conservatives. No candidate ever had a more
considerate press corps than Barry Goldwater in 1964, and four years later
the campaign press gave every possible break to Richard Nixon. Reporters
sense a social barrier between themselves and most conservative candidates;
their relations are formal and meticulously polite. But reporters tend to
loosen up around liberal candidates and campaign staffs; since they share the
same ideology, they can joke with the staffers, even needle them, without
being branded the “enemy.” If a reporter has been trained in the traditional,
“objective” school of journalism, this ideological and social closeness to the
candidate and the staff makes him feel guilty; he begins to compensate; the
more he likes and agrees with the candidate personally, the harder he judges
him professionally. Like a coach sizing up his own son in spring tryouts, the
reporter becomes doubly severe [pp. 355–356].

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7. One of the most novel features of the Lott-Hassett paper is that to define
unbiased, it constructs a baseline that can vary with exogenous factors. In contrast, some studies define unbiased simply as some sort of version of “presenting
both sides of the story.” To see why the latter notion is inappropriate, suppose that
a newspaper devoted just as many stories describing the economy under President
Clinton as good as it did describing the economy as bad. By the latter notion this
newspaper is unbiased. However, by Lott and Hassett’s notion the newspaper is
unbiased only if the economy under Clinton was average. If instead it was better
than average, then Lott and Hassett (as many would recognize as appropriate,
including us) would judge the newspaper to have a conservative bias. Like Lott
and Hassett, our notion of bias also varies with exogenous factors. For instance,
suppose that after a series of events, liberal (conservative) think tanks gain more

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greater-than-equilibrium profits, possibly even driving the other
outlets out of business. This is a compelling argument, and even
the libertarian Cato Journal has published an article agreeing
with the view: in this article Sutter [2001] notes that “Charges of
a liberal bias essentially require the existence of a cartel [p. 431].”
However, contrary to the prediction of the typical firm-location model, we find a systematic liberal bias of the U. S. media.
This is echoed by three other studies—Hamilton [2004], Lott and
Hassett [2004], and Sutter [2004], the only empirical studies of
media bias by economists of which we are aware.
Although his primary focus is not on media bias, in one
section of his book, Hamilton [2004] analyzes Pew Center surveys
of media bias. The surveys show— unsurprisingly—that conservatives tend to believe that there is a liberal bias in the media,
while liberals tend to believe there is a conservative bias. While
many would simply conclude that this is only evidence that “bias
is in the eyes of the beholder,” Hamilton makes the astute point
that that individuals are more likely to perceive bias the further
the slant of the news is from their own position. Since the same
surveys also show that conservatives tend to see a bias more than
liberals do, this is evidence of a liberal bias.
Lott and Hassett [2004] propose an innovative test for media
bias. They record whether the headlines of various economic news
stories are positive or negative. For instance, on the day that the
Department of Commerce reports that GDP grows by a large
degree, a newspaper could instead report “GDP Growth Less than
Expected.” Lott and Hassett control for the actual economic figures reported by the Department of Commerce, and they include
an independent variable that indicates the political party of the
president. Of the ten major newspapers that they examine, they
find that nine are more likely to report a negative headline if the
president is Republican.7

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Our greatest accomplishment as a profession is the development since World
War II of a news reporting craft that is truly non-partisan, and non-ideological,
and that strives to be independent of undue commercial or governmental influence. . . . It is that legacy we must protect with our diligent stewardship. To do
so means we must be aware of the energetic effort that is now underway to
convince our readers that we are ideologues. It is an exercise of, in disinformation, of alarming proportions. This attempt to convince the audience of the
world’s most ideology-free newspapers that they’re being subjected to agendadriven news reflecting a liberal bias. I don’t believe our viewers and readers will
be, in the long-run, misled by those who advocate biased journalism.8
. . . when it comes to free publicity, some of the major broadcast media
are simply biased in favor of the Republicans, while the rest tend to blur
differences between the parties. But that’s the way it is. Democrats should
complain as loudly about the real conservative bias of the media as the
Republicans complain about its entirely mythical bias . . .9
The mainstream media does not have a liberal bias. . . . ABC, CBS,
NBC, CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and
the rest—at least try to be fair.10

respect and credibility (say, because they were better at predicting those events),
which causes moderates in Congress to cite them more frequently. By our notion,
for a news outlet to remain unbiased, it also must cite the liberal (conservative)
think tanks more frequently. The only other media-bias study of which we are
aware that also constructs a baseline that controls for exogenous events is
Groeling and Kernell’s [1998] study of presidential approval. These researchers
examine the extent to which media outlets report increases and decreases in the
president’s approval, while controlling for the actual increases and decreases in
approval (whether reported by the media or not). The focus of the paper, however,
is on whether news outlets have a bias toward reporting good or bad news, not on
any liberal or conservative bias.
8. New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines accepting the “George
Beveridge Editor of the Year Award” at a National Press Foundation dinner,
shown live on C-SPAN2 February 20, 2003.
9. Paul Krugman, “Into the Wilderness,” New York Times, November 8, 2002.
10. Al Franken [2003, p. 3] Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair
and Balanced Look at the Right.

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Sutter [2004] collects data on the geographic locations of
readers of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report. He
shows that as a region becomes more liberal (as indicated by its
vote share for President Clinton), its consumption of the three
major national news magazines increases. With a clever and
rigorous theoretical model he shows that, under some reasonable
assumptions, this empirical finding implies that the U. S. newsmagazine industry, taken as a whole, is biased to the left.
Notwithstanding these studies, it is easy to find quotes from
prominent journalists and academics who claim that there is no
systematic liberal bias among the media in the United States,
some even claiming that there is a conservative bias. The following are some examples:

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1197

I’m going out telling the story that I think is the biggest story of our
time: how the right-wing media has become a partisan propaganda arm of
the Republican National Committee. We have an ideological press that’s
interested in the election of Republicans, and a mainstream press that’s
interested in the bottom line. Therefore, we don’t have a vigilant, independent press whose interest is the American people.11

II. DATA

11. Bill Moyers, quoted in “Bill Moyers Retiring from TV Journalism,” Frazier Moore, Associated Press Online, December 9, 2004.
12. Groseclose, Levitt, and Snyder [1999] argue that the underlying scales of
interest group scores, such as those compiled by the Americans for Democratic
Action, can shift and stretch across years or across chambers. This happens
because the roll call votes that are used to construct the scores are not constant
across time, nor across chambers. They construct an index that allows one to
convert ADA scores to a common scale so that they can be compared across time
and chambers. They call such scores adjusted ADA scores.
13. Importantly, we apply this conversion to congressional scores as well as
media scores. Since our method can only make relative assessments of the ideology of media outlets (e.g., how they compare with members of Congress or the
average American voter), this transformation is benign. Just as the average
temperature in Boston is colder than the average temperature in Baltimore,
regardless if one uses a Celsius scale or Fahrenheit scale, all conclusions we draw
in this paper are unaffected by the choice to use the 1999 House scale or the 1980
House scale.

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The web site, www.wheretodoresearch.com lists 200 of the
most prominent think tanks and policy groups in the United
States. Using the official web site of Congress, http://thomas.
loc.gov, we and our research assistants searched the Congressional Record for instances where a member of Congress cited one
of these think tanks.
We also recorded the average adjusted ADA score of the
member who cited the think tank. We use adjusted scores, constructed by Groseclose, Levitt, and Snyder [1999], because we
need the scores to be comparable across time and chambers.12
Groseclose, Levitt, and Snyder use the 1980 House scale as their
base year and chamber. It is convenient for us to choose a scale
that gives centrist members of Congress a score of about 50. For
this reason, we converted scores to the 1999 House scale.13
Along with direct quotes of think tanks, we sometimes included sentences that were not direct quotes. For instance, many
of the citations were cases where a member of Congress noted
“This bill is supported by think tank X.” Also, members of Congress sometimes insert printed material into the Congressional
Record, such as a letter, a newspaper article, or a report. If a
think tank was cited in such material or if a think tank member

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QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS

14. In the Appendix we report the results when we do include citations that
include an ideological label. When we include these data, this does not cause a
substantial leftward or rightward movement in media scores—the average media
score decreased by approximately 0.5 points; i.e., it makes the media appear
slightly more conservative. The greater effect was to cause media outlets to
appear more centrist. For instance, the New York Times and CBS Evening News
tended to give ideological labels to conservative think tanks more often than they
did to liberal think tanks. As a consequence, when we include the labeled observations, their scores, respectively, decreased (i.e., became more conservative) by
3.8 and 1.6 points. Meanwhile, Fox News’ Special Report tended to do the opposite.
When we included labeled observations, its score increased (i.e., became more
liberal) by 1.8 points. We think that such an asymmetric treatment of think tanks

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wrote the material, we treated it as if the member of Congress
had read the material in his or her speech.
We did the same exercise for stories that media outlets report, except with media outlets we did not record an ADA score.
Instead, our method estimates such a score.
Sometimes a legislator or journalist noted an action that a
think tank had taken— e.g., that it raised a certain amount of
money, initiated a boycott, filed a lawsuit, elected new officers, or
held its annual convention. We did not record such cases in our
data set. However, sometimes in the process of describing such
actions, the journalist or legislator would quote a member of the
think tank, and the quote revealed the think tank’s views on
national policy, or the quote stated a fact that is relevant to
national policy. If so, we would record that quote in our data set.
For instance, suppose that a reporter noted “The NAACP has
asked its members to boycott businesses in the state of South
Carolina. ‘We are initiating this boycott, because we believe that
it is racist to fly the Confederate Flag on the state capitol,’ a
leader of the group noted.” In this instance, we would count the
second sentence that the reporter wrote, but not the first.
Also, we omitted the instances where the member of Congress or journalist only cited the think tank so he or she could
criticize it or explain why it was wrong. About 5 percent of the
congressional citations and about 1 percent of the media citations
fell into this category.
In the same spirit, we omitted cases where a journalist or
legislator gave an ideological label to a think tank (e.g., “Even the
conservative Heritage Foundation favors this bill.”). The idea is
that we only wanted cases where the legislator or journalist cited
the think tank as if it were a disinterested expert on the topic at
hand. About 2 percent of the congressional citations and about 5
percent of the media citations involved an ideological label.14

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(i.e., to give labels more often to one side) is itself a form of media bias. This is why
we base our main conclusions on the nonlabeled data, which accounts for this form
of bias.
15. Groseclose, Levitt, and Snyder [1999] have not computed adjusted scores
for years after 1999. One consequence of this is that members who first entered
Congress in 2001 do not have adjusted scores. Consequently, we omitted these
observations from our sample. This omission causes little harm, if any, to our
estimation procedure. First, the citations of the new members comprised less than
one-half of 1 percent our sample. Second, the ideologies of the new members were
fairly representative of the old members. Third, even if the new members were not
representative, this fact alone would not cause a bias in our method. To see this,
suppose that these omitted members were disproportionately extreme liberals. To
estimate ADA scores for a media outlet, we need estimates of the citation behavior
of a range of members with ideologies near the ideology of the media outlet. If we
had omitted some extreme liberal members of Congress, this does not bias our
estimate of the citation pattern of the typical liberal, it only makes it less precise,
since we have less data for these members. If, on the other hand, new members
behaved differently from old members who have the same adjusted ADA score,
then this could cause a bias. For instance, suppose that new members with a 70
adjusted ADA score tend to cite conservative think tanks more often than do old
members with a 70 score. Then this would mean that Congress’s citation patterns
are really more conservative than we have recorded. This means the media’s
citation patterns are really more liberal (relative to Congress) than they appear in
our data set, which would mean that the media is really more liberal than our
estimates indicate. However, we have no evidence to believe this (or the opposite)
is the case. And even if it were, because the new members are such a small portion
of the sample, any bias should be small.

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For the congressional data, we coded all citations that occurred during the period January 1, 1993, to December 31, 2002.
This covered the 103rd through 107th Congresses. We used the
period 1993 to 1999 to calculate the average adjusted ADA score
for members of Congress.15
As noted earlier, our media data do not include editorials,
letters to the editor, or book reviews. That is, all of our results
refer only to the bias of the news of media. There are several
reasons why we do not include editorials. The primary one is that
there is little controversy over the slant of editorial pages; e.g.,
few would disagree that Wall Street Journal editorials are conservative, while New York Times editorials are liberal. However,
there is a very large controversy about the slant of the news of
various media outlets. A second reason involves the effect (if any)
that the media have on individuals’ political views. It is reasonable to believe that a biased outlet that pretends to be centrist has
more of an effect on readers’ or viewers’ beliefs than, say, an
editorial page that does not pretend to be centrist. A third reason
involves difficulties in coding the data. Editorial and opinion
writers, much more than news writers, are sometimes sarcastic
when they quote members of think tanks. If our coders do not
catch the sarcasm, they record the citation as a favorable one.

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